Friday 1:30 PM … the last minutes at work. I sign the leaving order, say my last words and head to Central Station. I get on the tram and carefully start calculating my time and fighting my greedy self over whether to stop by McDonald’s to grab something or not… I manage to beat it, because by rough estimates I might not make it to the station by 3:15, when I had a meeting with bate Irzhi.
Naturally, my rough estimates weren’t accurate at all … I got there almost 40 minutes early … At that moment my greedy self (which from here on, for short, I’ll call Piggy) started nagging me: “You could have stopped and grabbed something to eat, you know!”. After a few curses at Piggy’s address I walked into the station and stood there dumbstruck… “Damn! I’ve never seen so many people at this station!!!”. It was more packed than … I don’t know what… it was a crush 🙂 . I saw there was no room on the benches, so I went back outside and sat on the steps under the clock. I texted Ivan that it was a madhouse, and got instructions to buy the tickets right away :).
I went back inside and straight to the small ticket counters… I got through extremely fast. Naturally, because there were only 2-3 people ahead of me, while the other counters were some kind of madhouse. I got the tickets, with seats of course, and waited outside again. Ivan showed up around 3:40, because public transport, along with the taxis, are evil people 🙂 and we waited at the board for them to post where our train would be assembled. We sit, we wait, we sit, we wait … it hits :50… still no information.. by this point we’re in “Oh, damn it” mode, together with the whole rest of the station.
At some point the loudspeaker system (or whatever it’s called) starts announcing which train is where, and we watch the entire station rush toward the platforms…
After some quick pushing, shoving and stepping on toes, which would make American football players click their tongues, we make it to the platform and start looking for our seats. Car 12 here, car 12 there…. hop, we walk the whole train and reach the car. We squeeze in quickly, since it’s 3:58 PM and we expect the train to leave any moment, and inside…. ah, inside… Inside you had to be either a microbe to squeeze through or some kind of superman to shove aside the people frantically jostling in the corridors. Good thing our seats were in the 2nd compartment, and not somewhere in the middle, because there was a real chance of a scene from “Bloodsport X”.
Finally we settled in and waited for the train to leave. After about 2 minutes some old folks with reserved seats in our compartment show up and quickly chase away the ‘intruders’ (even though we knew them, but … fate). Unfortunately the 2 annoying old ladies from Berkovitsa stayed … everyone settled in and we started waiting for the train to leave.
Naturally, during this time I recognize one of the old men, who used to live next door to us until a few years ago. He, on the other hand, doesn’t recognize me… apparently dementia is having its say 😀
I’ll skip most of the details because there are so many that they’re hard to remember, but I’ll mention one that completely cracked me up:
…
– Man, he drinks coffee at Aunt Vatsa’s every morning!
– Aunt Vatsa?
– Yeah, the cups supposedly say Aunt Vatsa, and then it turns out it’s lavAzza
…
And so on for a full 4 hours of old-folks humor, which at times “rips your diaphragm and you get off at Septemvri (station) to have a new one grafted in”.
In the end we arrived in Montana about an hour late, but still an hour that passed quickly 🙂 On that note – if you’re traveling in a compartment full of old people and there are at least 2 grandpas, don’t feel sorry, the party is guaranteed 😀